The Shadow Cabinet

by Maureen Johnson

  A photo of two dead people.

  I don’t know how long I sat there holding that picture, looking at it as if I could magic myself into its world, fall inside its boundaries, and turn up on a beach in the past. Feelings kept spilling over me, confusing waves—jealousy of his sister, for making him so happy. Happiness that I’d found the photo, then giddiness, then a sharp hysteria, and then . . .

  Just crying. Heavy-duty, no air, no light, nothing but the sound of heaving crying. Crying until my body was dry and there was nothing left and it heaved in vain. When that was done, I was still sitting there in the empty room, holding a picture. I set it down gingerly and pushed myself to my feet. I stumbled back, my eyes still blurry, in the direction of what I believed to be the kitchen. There were blinds in this room, not curtains, and they had been drawn. Little lines of light came through and partially illuminated the sink. I put my head under the faucet and ran the tap water right into my mouth until I gagged and coughed. Then I leaned against the sink for a moment and waited until the gagging stopped. Now that I had let that all out, my thoughts were a little clearer. I lifted two slats of the blinds with my fingers and looked out at a view that consisted entirely of darkness, albeit darkness contained by what looked like some pretty high brick garden walls.

  I heard the front door open and Boo call my name. I splashed my face, dried it on my hoodie, and went back into the living room. Boo was there, looking a bit strained. Behind her, Callum had his hands rooted into the pockets of his coat.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Callum said nothing. A quiet Callum was an intimidating sight. He was—as much as I hate this word, I have to use it—built. Built like a thing that has been built by poets and people who love building things. And when I say intimidating, I don’t mean I thought Callum would hurt me. He never would. The pain, the rage at what happened, those things were evident. He was a mass of potential energy.

  Boo tapped his arm.

  “Listen,” she said, “we have to stick together, yeah? There’s work to be done. And we’re a team. We have to keep it together. We need to talk.”

  Nothing. He might as well have been a statue.

  “So,” Boo said, bravely carrying on, “we need to make a plan. Together. All of us.”

  “A plan for what?” Callum said.

  “Finding him,” she said.

  “Don’t say that,” Callum said.

  “Callum—”

  “I didn’t come here for that.”

  “Callum—”

  “He’s not—”

  “He is,” I said.

  The great statue that was Callum tipped its head toward me.

  “I know what I saw,” he said, and there was something terrible and raw in his voice. “I saw my best friend die.”

  “Callum . . .” Boo said again.

  “I’ve been walking around, yeah?” he said. “I walked all day. I walked because I thought I’d go mental if I stopped walking. I know what I saw. He died.”

  “You know that doesn’t mean anything,” Boo said. “Look at what we do.”

  “It means everything. Dead is dead. If you actually did bring him back, then you did the worst possible thing you could do to him. You got him into that accident. You should have let him go. I have to think he’s gone. He was my friend. You barely knew him.”

  “That’s it!” Boo said. Her hand went up, and her finger hovered in front of his face. “That’s enough, yeah? That’s enough. Rory did not kill Stephen. He drove that car himself. Rory did something in that room, and if it brought him back, he’s back. He’s still Stephen, and he’s still your friend. He’s still one of us, and nothing is different. Is this how you’re going to treat him? Like he’s a monster? So if you’re his friend, you get your head together and help us find him, and you do it now. Or else sling your hook.”

  Boo was shaking as she said these words. Callum drew into himself, his muscles straining against the fabric of his coat. He walked to the wall and back. The air between us felt like it was twitching.

  “If this happened, yeah?” Callum’s London accent had never seemed so gruff, so foreign to my ears. “If this happened—if you did this to him—then we have to find him. But if he was really here, wouldn’t he have come to us?”

  “It happened,” I said.

  “You didn’t stay for what happened next,” Boo added. “The lights in the hospital went out. The window in his room shattered and broke.”

  This didn’t seem to do much to endear me to Callum.

  “But he wasn’t there,” Callum said.

  “That’s not always how it works,” Boo said.

  “We usually find them where they die.”

  “Usually,” Boo said. “But this isn’t usual. We were thinking about places he lived. We checked the flat.”

  “So did I,” Callum said. “Both of them.”

  Callum had checked some places. He was sort of on our side.

  “Then we’ll check other places he lived. Eton. Do you know where his parents live?”

  “Somewhere in Kent.”

  “It’s probably in here somewhere,” Boo said, looking around at the bags on the floor. “Some record or something from school.”

  “He wouldn’t go to his parents. He hated them. Eton too.”

  “Might not be a choice,” Boo said. “We have to look. He got the sight at Eton, yeah?”

  “When he—” Callum cut himself off.

  “He told me,” I said, “he almost killed himself. Because of what happened to his sister. It was in a boathouse or something?”

  “It’s somewhere to look.” Boo pulled out her phone and checked something.

  “Eton is near Windsor. If we take Thorpe’s car, we can be there in an hour. Let’s find the other address.”

  She dove into the bags of paperwork alone and dug around for a few minutes before giving up.

  “We’ll get it from Thorpe,” she said. “We’ll start at Eton. Rory, are you okay, being here?”

  So she had changed her mind on that one. I didn’t want to hold them back, and I didn’t want to be alone. Alone was the end of the world.

  “Go,” I said.

  Callum turned to the door and left. Boo came over to me and took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye.

  “We’ll sort it,” she said. “It’ll be okay, yeah?”

  “Callum hates me.”

  “He doesn’t. He’s upset, that’s all. I’ll talk to him. I’ll sort it.”

  I didn’t know if Boo believed these things could all be fixed or was talking herself into it.

  Then it was just me and the box again, and I wasn’t going back in there. I curled up on the sofa and turned on the television for some company. I needed noise, light, something to fill the vacuum. I would use this time. I would think about this problem. Where would Stephen be? Not Eton, not his parents’. Those didn’t feel right to me. There had to be an answer.

  Or there was no answer at all. That was the other possibility.

  I closed my eyes like I had at the hospital and tried to return to Imaginary Uncle Bick and the bird store. I could see the store in my mind, hear the birds tweeting and bickering overhead, feel the little feathers fluttering down and landing on my face. I could see my uncle’s beardy face, hear his broad Southern accent saying my name, see the A Bird in Hand logo on his baseball cap—but he had no wisdom to impart to me. He was sweetly silent, and the birds flew around. As I found myself drifting, I felt like there might be someone lingering in the aisles of the store, over by the birdseed bells and tiny mirrors, and I wanted to say something about this to Uncle Bick, but he shook his head and said, “They’re sleeping.”

  Then I was too.

  6

  THE NEXT THING I KNEW, THORPE WAS SITTING ACROSS from me in different clothes. I sat up with a jolt.

&
nbsp; “What time is it?”

  “Just after nine.”

  “Nine?”

  “In the morning,” he said.

  The curtains were still closed, so the room was dark.

  “I slept?” I said, rubbing my head.

  “Shock,” he said. “It’s what happens. Boo and Callum went to Eton last night. They didn’t find anything. They’re driving to Kent now, to where Stephen’s family is.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to find anything there,” I said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Normally,” he said, standing up, “I wouldn’t be able to work with that. But this isn’t normal, is it?”

  He blinked, and I wondered if he had slept. It was possible he’d been sitting in that chair all night, looking at me. He had a massive paper coffee cup sitting on the floor and another in his hand.

  “That’s a lot of coffee,” I said.

  “I need to go out as well,” he said. “Something to attend to. I didn’t want to leave until I spoke to you. You’re secure in here. Boo left you last night, which was against instruction, but as long as the alarm is on and you don’t . . .”

  He fumbled around with his coat. No, no sleep for Thorpe. This was not happening. I was going to be left in this stupid empty house again while Stephen and Charlotte were out there. Not that I had any more of a plan than last night.

  “I should be doing something,” I said.

  “You should be staying here, at least until we have Jane and the others in custody. Set the alarm behind me. Boo and Callum will be back in a few hours.”

  “But . . .”

  “I have to attend to the body,” he said. He wasn’t mean about it, just direct. The body. In this impossible new reality, Stephen was “the body.” Which made me think of something that should have occurred to me sooner—I mean, I knew it on some level, but there is knowing something in the back of your mind, and knowing it in the front of your mind, where you see how it’s relevant to your actual life. That body, now separated from Stephen, was the same one I had seen some parts of and touched some parts of the night before. And now, just when everything was good, that body was gone. However Stephen came back to us, I could not touch him. I was actively dangerous to him.

  I looked at my hands, as if this were their fault.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said. “You can do something. You can go through these bags. There might be something in there that’s useful.”

  This was Thorpe’s way of throwing me a bone. Those bags contained notes, documents—stuff relating to the squad that I guessed very few people would ever be allowed to see.

  “Make yourself some tea,” he said. “I brought some fruit and packets of cereal. Eat.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I mean it. If you don’t eat, you don’t function. If you want to be useful, eat, then go through the documents.”

  When he left, I did as he said—I made a cup of tea, and I ate some honey nut flakes dry, out of the box. In the living room, I opened the curtains to let in some light. I was going to sit on the floor, so it wasn’t like anyone was going to be able to see me, and I couldn’t read all these papers under the sick glow of the cheap lamps.

  Also, I was tired of being in the dark.

  There were nine bags in total, all stuffed and thick with papers, folders, and notebooks. This prospect was less imposing than the box. These were Stephen’s professional thoughts, and somewhere in here there might be an answer. In the light of day, tea in body, something to do—I started to feel almost normal.

  The first bag was useless. Lots of police stuff, lots of the forms that Stephen had tried to implement to bring some order to what they did. Boo and Callum had made fun of him for these, and I could see why. Nothing direct was mentioned on the forms. They didn’t have boxes marked, “List how many ghosts you blew up today.” There were places for an address, a time, a few coded things. All they told me was where a ghost had been found and if a T had happened. T, I soon figured, meant terminus or terminate, which was the same thing. Boo’s rarely had Ts. Callum’s almost always did. Stephen’s was half and half. In with these there was a London A–Z, which was a standard-issue book of maps they sold everywhere in the city. It was all of London, in detail, with an index in the back so you could look up any street and go right to that page. He had marked this one up with dots and Post-its stuck to the pages, dozens of them.

  12 December

  Called to Tower Hill after unexplained power cut. Subject (female, date unknown) seen walking on track surface. Coaxed to platform. Subject had fallen in front of the train. T, 18:45.

  16 December

  Subject at Dead Man’s Hole, female, recent (within last ten years). Left to remain. Possible contact.

  18 December

  Family of six (date unknown but looked to be late 19th or early 20th), two parents, three children, one infant, found in Catharine Wheel Alley. On questioning responded that there had been a fire in the night. T group, 20:35.

  28 December

  Subject (male, date unknown) spotted on Embankment. Subject had jumped into river. This subject seemed aware of passing time. T, 22:00.

  These notes weren’t on every page—London is massive—but there were a lot of them. Maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. What it looked like he was doing was taking the information from the forms and making a map of the ghosts of London—who they were, what they were generally up to.

  I dug into the next bag. This was full of loose paperwork. Most of it looked boring or irrelevant—details of police training at Hendon. Handouts about police procedures, paperwork, uniforms, standards of conduct. There were copies of signed forms signifying the completion of different units of training—defensive driving, evidence processing, what forms to fill out. So much of this was about filling out forms. There were several sets of photocopies from what looked like academic works on magic and myth and ritual. I glanced through these very quickly before setting them into their own pile.

  At the bottom of one of the bags was a small black hardback notebook bound shut with an elastic band. I snapped this off. Inside, I was greeted with what looked like pure gibberish:

  LXXIKTZIHVHZ

  NCXWTUGVGTA

  QXQDYPWNY

  There were a few pages of this, broken usually into blocks of one or two lines. I flipped through the entire book, but nothing else was written in it. I stared at this for a while. This was clearly something very different from the rest of the materials. I set this aside. This would need coming back to.

  I continued going through the bags quickly, trying to get a sense of what was here. What I found in the next two was more police paperwork and forms. The forms were endless. I nearly went into a trance sifting through these and was about to push the bag aside, when one piece of paper caught my eye. It was thicker, better quality. There was a raised official seal in the corner that read FOR HOME OFFICE USE ONLY. And then I saw—it was Stephen’s whole past on a page.

  INTAKE FORM

  Surname: Dene

  Given name: Stephen Dorian

  Place of birth: Canterbury, Kent

  Parents: Edward and Diana Dene (banker/wedding planner)

  Siblings: Regina Claudette Dene (deceased aged 17, recreational opiate overdose, ruled accidental)

  Education:

  Winchester House School, Brackley, Northamptonshire

  Eton College

  Honours: House Captain, Godolphin House; Oppidan Scholar; Sixth Form Select

  Sport: Rowing

  Admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, department of Natural Sciences (Chemistry) [did not attend]

  Languages known: French, Latin, some Italian

  Recruited: via hospital

  Notes on first interview: Dene presents as highly inte
lligent, competent. Does not appear to have many outside interests outside of reading and some sport. Does not appear to have wide social circle. Speaks of Eton and parents with flat affect. When asked about sister, will not reply beyond fact that she is deceased.

  Recommendation: Exceptional intelligence and sterling academic record make him natural candidate. Recommended for stage two at Hendon immediately following discharge.

  There was an addendum at the bottom of the page:

  Instructors at Hendon note that Dene is highly competent and progressing well. However, in standard risk-assessment simulations, Dene either fails to notice or discounts certain dangers. He seems to have a certain lack of regard for personal safety. Despite some reservations, recommended for stage three. Continue monitoring.

  Which told me exactly one thing—they knew. They knew that Stephen was exactly the kind of person who would throw himself into the line of fire. He’d done it twice with me, the second time being the one that really counted.

  Someone had known he was like this and had let things go on anyway.

  This is when the rage began. It came down on me like thunder—like a big Southern summer storm, taking over everything, cracking through the sky. Thorpe, and whoever else Thorpe worked with, they let this happen. Thorpe, who was matter-of-factly dealing with the body. The body.

  Last night’s tears were this morning’s current of electricity. I was leaving this house. I would look all over London. I would burn London down if I had to.

  But I still didn’t have a plan.

  I stood, hands on hips, heart pounding, staring down at the piles I had created around the room. I grabbed the A–Z and flipped through the book. I turned to where I thought we were now, Highgate. There were a few notes on this page, but the one that caught my eye was this: